RE: [ActiveDir] Inplace DC upgrade to 2003 on HP/Compaq hardware?

[Vermeire Bart]

Title: Message

Hi,   we have upgraded our entire forest last year from W2K to W2K3. We are running on HP/CPQ ProLiant Servers. We upgraded most of the servers, only a few were demoted and reinstalled. All our servers are iLO enabled and we exclusively used it for all upgrades/reinstalls. To accomplish that, we created a single bootable W2K3 CD containing some additional HP Software (Support Pack for W2K3) and a combination of OS hotfixes. That one was sent to all sites who inserted it in the server before we started. Since SmartStart was not required in this process (it was already installed during the initial W2K install), we didn't need to swap CD's. These are some things to consider (there are a lot but these I find important): - if you upgrade, will you do it offline to avoid possible virus infection while the OS has not been patched for certain vulnerabilities (we did) - if today you have a Windows 2000 Certificate server (Enterprise Root) and you are using it to deploy certificates to the DC's, you should consider to upgrade that one first to W2K3 because the templates required for W2K3 are not supported on a W2K Certificate Server and that will cause some errors. We had issues that NetLogon did not want to start... - don't forget to do an offline defrag after the upgrade. On upgraded servers, we saw our DIT file shrink substantially. - we rigorously tested this procedure in our QA lab   I must agree with Ken and Al that wipe and load is probably the best scenario, however, we didn't do it because we would have lost a lot of data in our systems management tool. That one uses a unique ID (dynamically generated and not transferable) for each object in it's database. A reinstalled server got a new one   Bart   From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mulnick, Al Sent: Monday, August 02, 2004 23:09 To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Inplace DC upgrade to 2003 on HP/Compaq hardware? If that doesn't work, HP offers the ability to provision servers.  You may want to talk to your rep about the options they have for doing deploying images on their platform.   Wipe/reload is the way to go IMHO - prevents any question that something came over in the upgrade to make the OS less than optimum i.e. drivers, etc that didn't get handled correctly.   Al From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ken Cornetet Sent: Monday, August 02, 2004 3:35 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Inplace DC upgrade to 2003 on HP/Compaq hardware? These servers have older RIB boards that don't do remote CDROM drives.   One thing that just occurred to me is to try doing a 2003 install from the OS cdrom and skip smart start altogether. I'd then install the support pack after the base install. May have to test that... -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Adams, Kenneth W (Ken) Sent: Monday, August 02, 2004 1:48 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Inplace DC upgrade to 2003 on HP/Compaq hardware? Personally, I'd go with your alternate option of performing a wipe and load.  That ensures you don't have any inefficiencies carried over from the previous OS.   If you copy the OS and HP Support Pack software onto a networked share, you should be able to perform the installations without having anyone on site to swap CDs.  You would link to the share from the target server using its RIB connection, run the setup program and select the new installation option (it will copy the files it needs to the local drive).  Once the OS is installed, you would establish a link to the network share that contains the HP Support Software and run it's setup program.   I've performed this operation from the console of one of my local servers when going from NT4 to 2000.  We're not licensed to use 2K3 yet (will be next year), so I don't have personal experience with 2000 to 2K3 (yet).   HTH. Ken Adams -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ken Cornetet Sent: Monday, August 02, 2004 1:49 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [ActiveDir] Inplace DC upgrade to 2003 on HP/Compaq hardware? Has anyone done an in-place upgrade from 2000 to 2003 on HP/Compaq servers?   I am trying to put together a plan for upgrading our forest, and one of the sticky points is our remote domain controllers. What I would like to do is update each DC to the latest 2k support pack, then do an in-place 2003 upgrade, then grab the latest 2k3 support pack (I am assuming that the 2k and 2k3 versions of support pack are different).   I will, of course, test in the lab, but as some great admiral once said: "The best scale for an experiment is twelve inches to the foot". I'd like to hear from someone who's done this in the real world.   My other option is to demote the existing DC, rebuild from scratch, and promote. I can do this fairly easy (all my remote DCs have RIB cards), but it will require someone at each location to swap the smart start CD with the OS cd.